


Time Yet Still

by LandOfMistAndSecrets



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Azure Moon Route, Bittersweet Ending, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Extremely So In Fact, M/M, Post-Canon, Sad and Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26134720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LandOfMistAndSecrets/pseuds/LandOfMistAndSecrets
Summary: Felix swore once never to die on Dimitri's behalf.Deep down, he wonders. Was it that oath that doomed him to such lasting good health?
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 7
Kudos: 83





	Time Yet Still

**Author's Note:**

> For @MistressAkira12 - thank you again. 🥰
> 
> CW: While no one dies in this fic, it is a bit about dying, or at least, being near the end of one's life.

Dimitri cannot recall the last time that he saw Felix cry -- _truly_ cry, with no source to blame for his tears except his own emotion. He thinks back and back, to before the war and before the Academy, all the way back to the days of their childhood, and still the memory of it refuses to crystalize. He can remember Felix _crying,_ of course; he did so often. But the very _last time?_

His memories are spotty, foggy on the best of days. He simply cannot recall. 

Felix is crying, now. 

Dimitri studies him, smiling faintly. He is weary from the day’s exertions, certainly, but he feels peaceful, content. Felix tightens his grip on the front of his nightshirt and grits his teeth against what must be a sob attempting to claw its way up out of his throat. He blinks those pretty golden eyes of his, once, and tears leave a wet shine on his cheeks. 

“I told you,” he says, his voice rough, strained. “I _told_ you this would happen.” 

Dimitri’s smile widens, and Felix’s fine features pull into a familiar scowl. His face is webbed now with lines that gather at the corners of his eyes and the edges of his mouth, outlining all the places where he has spent his life glaring and frowning and sighing in varying states of exasperation and exasperated fondness -- and smiling, and laughing, and frightening the children into begrudging obedience, too, perhaps the most important of the many services he has performed throughout the years. 

Dimitri loves him so much, so deeply, that he feels his heart flutter, and he thinks -- _Goddess, if it gives out now, he’ll kill me himself, before I die._

“Stop _smiling,_ ” Felix scolds him, and he punctuates this with a sniff, an actual tiny little _sniffle,_ and Dimitri reaches out to brush his thumbs through the trail his falling tears have left behind. “This isn’t something to smile about, you simpering, romantic fool. You’re _dying._ You are _working yourself to death,_ precisely as I’ve told you half a hundr-- _mmph!_ ’ 

This last, because Dimitri has risen from his chair and taken Felix’s beloved face in his hands and begun kissing him, deeply and passionately. 

It is the most efficient method he has ever found to halt one of Felix’s familiar fits of temper. 

Felix indulges him, as he usually does, and it is as familiar as it always is, and yet different, too. This time, Felilx’s shoulders shake. His cheeks are wet. Instead of a sigh or a gasp or even a stifled, embarrassed moan, it is a heart wrenching, broken sob that tumbles out of him and fills the air between their moving lips. 

Dimitri pulls back, and then brushes the hair that has fallen into Felix’s eyes gently away. He likes to look into them -- always, but especially at times like these. Difficult times. They’ve had their share, through the years, but Felix does not cry. 

Glenn’s funeral, Dimitri thinks. That is the first time he can remember thinking -- even lost as he had been himself, that day -- _how strange that Felix seems so very composed._ He had not cried that last day in Garreg Mach, when they had parted ways to go to war, or that first day in that very same place, five years later. Felix had stood still as a statue, his face a mask of horrified sorrow, but he hadn’t shed a single tear for the monster he’d found. Dimitri could still recall his steely defiance. 

He had not cried the day they’d buried Rodrigue, though Dimitri had, and such was the theme of the events that followed. The day he’d been crowned king, the day they’d won the war, the day Felix had agreed to exchange rings with him, in secret. 

At this memory, Dimitri’s lips turn up, again, and he pulls Felix’s head against his chest. He smooths his hands over his head, into his long hair, soft to the touch and glossy blue-black still, save for the grey streaks about his temples that only serve to make him somehow more beautiful. They’d worn those damned rings beneath their shirts for years, until the day Dimitri’s kind and wise and so _very_ observant bride had admonished the both of them for thinking to deceive her or deprive themselves on her behalf. 

They wear them on their hands, now. 

No one says a word. 

Felix had not cried the day Dimitri’s first child was born; instead, he had held Dimitri’s head in his lap and ran his fingers through his hair and murmured tired yet gentle encouragement to him while _Dimitri_ had sobbed helplessly in his lap. Dimitri had knelt there against him, awake and overwhelmed for hours, long after his wonderful, miraculous wife had fallen fast and deep into well deserved rest, their child cradled gently at her breast. 

He had not cried for any of the subsequent births, either, though Dimitri only seemed to grow weepier as the years went on. Or so Felix often claimed. Perhaps it only seemed so to him because he grew ever more steadfast, as though in stubborn opposition to Dimitri, always. 

“Ssh,” Dimitri whispers to him, now. “It’s all right.” He turns his lips into his hair, and presses a kiss atop his head. 

Felix whimpers against him like he is ten years old, again, and suffering beneath the weight of some cataclysmic despair of his childhood -- a spar lost to an elder brother, again, or perhaps a scolding from his father that he felt was undeserved. But Felix is not a child, anymore, and this is no fleeting tragedy. Felix is an old man, and so is he. They have both been dying. It is only that Dimitri is dying faster. 

It is undeniable, now. He accepts it, easily, with guilty relief, because he is not the one who will have to live on without Felix by his side. 

Felix sobs in his arms, shaking and swearing and then pounding an angry fist against his back -- but not too hard, Dimitri notes, with a sad twinge of fondness in his breast. Another part of their history, ending. Felix will never be rough with him again. 

“It’s all right,” Dimitri assures him, because it’s easy for him, so easy. He knows this, and he knows Felix knows this, and they know each other so completely that Felix does not even say it; he simply makes a sound, a brief watery hitching snort so full of knowing disgust that Dimitri cannot help but laugh to hear it. 

He squeezes his arms tight around Felix, his beloved Felix, and laughs, gently, until Felix is sniffling and shaking his head and laughing a little bit, too. Begrudgingly, of course. 

“Sit down,” Felix snaps at him, eventually, and Dimitri does, because isn’t it the least that he can do? Felix’s hands find his shoulders, push him back, and Dimitri lets himself be pushed, lets Felix climb over him into the reclining seat and settle his body atop him. They are alone, now, and will be until his Queen knocks gently at the door to interrupt them -- but she has an intuition for these things, and Dimitri knows that she will give them time enough before she allows herself the luxury of mourning, too. 

Felix presses his face against his chest, and sighs, long and deep. Eventually, his soft, hiccuping sobs slow, and then entirely subside, and it is only the two of them, breathing. Dimitri runs his hands down his back, first in straight lines, then in thoughtless patterns, circles and curls with his fingertips, sharp curves and divots with his thumbs. 

“No more finding you up in the small hours, bent over a candle at your desk,” Felix says, abruptly. 

“Felix…” 

“I’m serious,” he hisses. “Dimitri. You were _not breathing._ ” 

The healers corroborate his story. It is the only reason Dimitri believes he is not exaggerating. He sighs, every bit as theatrically as Felix, before him. 

“Fine,” he agrees. “No more.” 

“Your lips were --” 

“ _Felix,_ ” he says, and he puts a touch of authority in it, just enough to remind Felix who is King. 

Felix falls quiet, stormy in his arms. 

“I will be careful,” he promises, gently. “Do you think I wish to cause you -- either of you -- such pain?” His mouth twists. But he is dying. The dizzy spells, the bouts of weakness. The sudden pains, stealing his breath away, tingling up the nerves of his arm and into his neck, sharp and strange. 

The healers will do what they can to keep the Savior King alive. This is undeniable. 

But Felix is in perfect health, and always has been. He leads an acerbic life of military excellence; he is feared by swordsmen in their prime, less than half his age. He will outlast him, and this, too, is undeniable. 

Felix makes an unhappy sound, as though he has read his thoughts. 

“You will walk with me every morning,” Felix says, as though the prospect is a punishment. “We will not speak of work. You will drink your tea, and we will observe the squires at their drills.” 

Dimitri laughs, softly. “Is that not work?” he wonders aloud. 

“When Dedue arrives --” 

“I know,” Dimitri promises, cutting him off cleanly, reaching down to turn his head and silence him further with a kiss, awkward at this angle, but no less sweet. Felix shifts to sidle up his body, improving the angle considerably, and then leans forward and parts his lips -- but only briefly. When he clicks his teeth together, he nearly takes Dimitri’s tongue off. 

“We’ll have to be careful with _that,_ too,” he says, unhappily. 

“I can be careful,” Dimitri teases, in reply. “Let me show you.” 

“Absolutely not,” Felix says, and then -- 

There is a gentle knock against the door. 

Felix meets his eyes and smiles. “See? We don’t have the time,” he says, and then he climbs off him, heedless of Dimitri’s whining protests or his grasping hands. 

“You are conspiring against me,” Dimitri complains, falling back with a huff against the plush back of the recliner. Felix bends over him to press a kiss against his lips, and Dimitri pretends not to notice the wet drops that fall onto his face as he does. Felix has never appreciated the comfort of words. He will ask for his preferred sort of solace when he is ready to accept it, Dimitri thinks. 

“Treason?” Felix scoffs, and he kisses him again. “Is that the charge?” 

“Of the highest degree,” Dimitri murmurs, chasing his lips. 

“Good.” Felix pulls back, and flicks the tip of his nose with one finger. “Kill me quickly, then,” he says, moving for the door. His hair sways back and forth as he shakes his head, and Dimitri grins, watching him, mesmerized. 

“I love you,” he calls after him, just as Felix’s hand falls upon the latch. 

He twists sharply, glaring over his shoulder. “Then _live,_ ” he snarls. 

He is bristling, angry, trapped, _furious._ His narrow, piercing amber eyes are wet and shining, still. And Dimitri thinks, dreamily, smiling -- though he is certainly, inevitably dying -- that he has never loved him more. But perhaps he will. They have time yet, still, for miracles. 


End file.
